Altman says four years of college may be more than the world now needs

Sam Altman told a summit of tech interns that two years of college was “the exact right amount of time” for him and that four years may be more than the world now requires. He made the case to an audience whose entry-level pipeline is already being closed by AI.

Sam Altman thinks a degree takes longer than it needs to. Two years at Stanford was “the exact right amount of time” for him, the OpenAI chief said, and staying would have brought “vastly diminishing returns.”

He was talking to tech interns. The remarks came during a surprise appearance at Internapalooza, a networking summit run by investor Cory Levy for students spending the summer in the industry.

“I’ve sort of thought that maybe the way the world has evolved, college just shouldn’t be as long as it is,” Altman said, while allowing that it was “still great to meet people and kind of like live on your own and get to work on projects.”

The audience is what complicates it. TNW has reported that AI is killing the summer internship, the mechanism that has long converted students into employees.

Nor is that only an American problem. A Swiss study found fewer job ads aimed at career starters as automation absorbed the tasks juniors used to be hired for.

Altman’s other advice pointed the same way without meaning to. “You can make a whole startup kind of by yourself in a room with a lot of AI tokens, but not much else,” he said.

Heard from a founder’s chair that is liberating. Heard from an internship, it is a description of a job that might not need filling.

Not everyone reads the trend that way. Adecco’s chief executive has argued that AI is changing jobs rather than destroying them, which is the more optimistic case and not an unreasonable one.

The rest of the session was conventional founder advice. People waste effort trying to be taken seriously, Altman said, though he conceded that enterprise sales was the exception and that he eventually solved it by hiring a 50-year-old.

His own route is worth remembering before anyone acts on this. Altman left Stanford in 2005 to co-found Loopt, which landed in Y Combinator’s first batch and led to him running the incubator, while his mentor Peter Thiel pays $250,000 over two years to under-22s on condition they drop out. As Altman put it himself, “you don’t get to run the experiment twice.“